¿No has soñado nunca que tenías un amigo, Alec? Nada más que eso, "mi amigo", que él procuraba ayudarte a ti y tú a él, un amigo... "Alguien a quien entregar tu vida entera y que te entregara también la suya. Supongo que algo así no puede suceder fuera de los sueños."

oh my goodness oh my goodness oh my goodness
oh my fucking god this was heavenly

4.5****

That was amazing. I don’t think more can be said that hasn’t be said before.

This tugged in my heart strings and I am glad for a happy ending.

This book was chosen by my fellow Romance History Project readers as a sort of counter-programming to our experience reading The Lord Won't Mind, which was cited by the list we're reading from as "the first queer romance to find a mainstream audience." For reasons that my review of that book suggests, we really didn't want The Lord Won't Mind to be the only note we hit in terms of early foundational queer love stories. Maurice made sense as further reading: it's not a genre romance in the sense that it focuses on a single central couple, but it does celebrate a happy romantic ending of a love story between two male characters. It is also not unrelated to Merrick's novel historically, as apparently Merrick read the manuscript of Maurice (which was not published until after Forster's death) before publishing his own. 

The short version here is that I found Maurice immensely beautiful and moving, as well as stunningly written, and it was fascinating to read it in a "romance headspace" despite fully knowing it's not a genre romance and has never been received as such. The story follows Maurice from his school days through adulthood, and starts by centering his romance with Clive, another Cambridge student with whom Maurice falls in a kind of idealized, slightly more conceptual than physical, love. 

This is, however, not the primary romance: Clive rather brutally and unilaterally decides to end their relationship, becoming convinced (though not entirely convincing the reader) that he is suddenly horrified by homosexuality and wants only to be with women going forward. Maurice's mourning of the end of this relationship - and his grappling with the fear that something is "wrong" with him for his own desires - is poignant, and hard to read, but treated with what felt like a lot of compassion. 

The story ends as Maurice falls in love with Alec, the groundskeeper on Clive's estate. Their path to love is short, and tumultuous, but is also kind of beautifully granted what passes for the E.M. Forster/early-20th-century version of the "running through the airport" scene we all know from romance movies:  Alec is supposed to leave on a boat for South America, and Maurice shows up to tearfully bid him farewell, only to discover that Alec isn't actually on the boat, and has gone back to their traditional meeting place to wait for Maurice.  Cue swelling music (ok, not really) and a reunion and pledge to find a way to be together, forever.

I think what moved me most about this book is the prose, and particularly the way it handled the alluded-to and the unsaid. Forster gave instructions for this book not to be published in his lifetime, knowing the likely reaction to it, and that difficult reality necessarily haunts any reading of the book in the present. But I think what I found particularly moving is that what is absent or unsaid in this book isn't the fact of Maurice's attraction to men, or his love for Clive and then Alec. It's simply the space to fully express those things: a space which the novel grants him both within the text (by imagining Maurice and Alec living out their lives together "in the greenwood") and metatextually (by inscribing their happy, loving future onto the landscape of literature). 

So many of the lines I highlighted dealt directly with a feeling of absence, of empty space where something should be. I think I am going to be forever haunted by this description of Maurice grappling with the fact that Clive has gotten married to a woman and has the life he set out to acquire, leaving Maurice alone and confused: 

"[Clive's] ideal of marriage was temperate and graceful, like all his ideals, and he found a fit helpmate in Anne, who had refinement herself, and admired it in others. They loved each other tenderly. Beautiful convention received them - while beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips and the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air."

  

The insistence on an absence that Maurice feels makes the ending all the more poignant (also, just one of the most beautiful pieces of writing I have ever read. I guess if you don't want 60-year-old spoilers, stop here?). Maurice has a final confrontation of sorts with Clive, from which Maurice, at some point, just... disappears? Not from the point of view of the reader, who knows that he goes on to live happily with Alec, but from the point of view of Clive, who has, without fully realizing when, lost Maurice. 

"They were his last words, because Maurice had disappeared thereabouts, leaving no trace of his presence except a little pile of the petals of the evening primrose, which mourned from the ground like an expiring fire."

The idea that Maurice can, to Clive, only be an absence - not because there are "the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air" but because he has found a space to go and love the man he wants to be with... presented like this, it's extraordinarily moving. I sometimes find myself wishing that romance prose would... leave more things unsaid, let me do the work of interpreting and understanding? I found such a beautiful expression of what that reading mode feels like here. Again, this isn't a romance, but I think there's a lot to be gained in it for romance readers, and just general lovers of epically great prose.

So tender and intimate; I almost felt like I was intruding in on the characters. Where authors like Wilde and Waugh skirt around the subject, Forster presents a firm, bitter condemnation of English homophobia. I'm astonished that Forster wrote about the subject so bluntly and with so much vision in 1913, especially considering he completed it at a time when Maurice and Alec's love was law-defying. I guess it's because above all else, Maurice is clearly a very personal story.

There might not be much going on between the lines—but the fact that Forster refused to write a bleak ending, just so there was at least one story in the world where gay lovers could be happy, even if it was unrealistic, is social commentary enough for me. Long live the Unspeakable Vice of the Greeks.

I was curious how reading the novel would be, knowing the film adaptation (1987, Merchant Ivory), very well...

I really enjoyed it

Vladimir Nabokov wrote in Pnin:

n  Some people—and I am one of them—hate happy ends. We feel cheated. Harm is the norm. Doom should not jam. The avalanche stopping in its tracks a few feet above the cowering village behaves not only unnaturally but unethically.n

This is true for me as well. While of course I was cheering for the titular hero through the course of his internal and external struggle for identity, I can't help but feel, after finishing the book "well, that was very nice, but life is not like that!" Endings are very particular thing, there is no sense of an ending in a novel, that is excepting for death. Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Lolita, etc. are all very satisfying in their fatal finales. It is the sad ending, the nadir and despair which is reached as the hero comes to the final fall, that is what satisfies a reader. It is the bottom which gives us the sense of completion, and not the peak. We are never finished with a full glass, only an empty one. The ending for Maurice is a happy one, and deliberately so, as was the intention of Forster, but I am not sure it is the right one. The whole story of Scudder to me seems a bit forced, a bit sudden, and a bit melodramatic; the reason to love this book is rather for the first half with the slow but genuine kinship between Maurice and Clive.

This is, of course, a "gay novel" - perhaps the early prototype of the pandering, panegyric course which that genre has taken: the road from internal struggle to external/societal struggle, to personal acceptance and then to the (not reached in Maurice) ultimate acceptance and embrace from the society or community at large. To be sure it is an interesting story, but with inevitable issue of being pigeonholed by its very protagonist's proclivities. I have been thinking very much about the statement that "gay novels don't sell" - and I would largely agree with this sentiment. For the same reason gay movies don't sell, etc. Of course there is the significance of numbers: homosexuals (apparently) constitute only ten-percent of the population at large, a small market. But if you consider the proliferation of successful black-novels, for example, certainly there success rides not on their portrayed demographic, but rather the entire market. I'm sure very few of the devout readership of the Harry Potter series are wizards or other magically inclined persons, but they buy and read them nonetheless. How important is it to share the characteristics of the protagonist or narrator? I enjoy Lolita although I am not a pedophile and if anything have an aversion to children (messy and whiny cretins that they are), I can read Jane Eyre and enjoy it despite my lack of female accouterments. There are bestsellers about blind kids and autistic kids and black folks and Asian-Americans and all sorts of minority demographics which the overall market for literature devour, with that "minority voice" being consider a testament to the literary value of the work. So why isn't it the same for queer literature? I confess that even I am not frequently moved by it, unremoved as I am, unless it is an otherwise moving narrative, such as Baldwin's Giovanni's Room.

Homosexuality is a unique struggle, I think, and should make for compelling literature, but yet it is hard to portray. Unlike race, gender, ethnicity, it is a very internalized characteristic, which can't be seen with the eyes at all (without a high percent of false-positives, anyway!). It is a matter of the heart, a matter of desire. A novel can be written with a black protagonist and they can desire anything: success, love, freedom, etc. - anything. But for a novel to be a gay novel that particular sexual desire is prone to the foreground, as in the present novel, as in Giovanni's Room et cetera. Perhaps the best portrayal of homosexuality is The Great Gatsby, wherein I would contend that Nick Carraway is gay - something alluded to indirectly if not obtusely throughout the novel, but far from canonically agreed upon. But even Fitzgerald's ambiguous narrator fails to address the particular queer experience, and as such appeals to a wider audience. Is it that the queer experience is too different, or is it that it is not different enough? Perhaps it has the sense of being self-indulgent? I am not sure. How can anyone be sure how their plight relates to anyone else's? Perhaps literature helps, but certainly no one's struggle, real or fictional, is exactly the same.

And maybe it is for that reason that queer novels fail, as they do? I don't feel that Fitzgerald (or Melville, or Twain, or Lee, or whomever wrote what is considered the top contender) meant to write the "Great American Novel" when he wrote The Great Gatsby (or Moby-Dick, Huckleberry Finn, etc.) - he wrote the story of Jay Gatsby, of Nick Carraway et al. That book, which is a compressed carbuncle of the human condition of one man, is one which appeals to many individuals, Americans etc., because we can see in another's struggle a glimmer of our own individual struggle. Same in Jane Eyre, we see not an orphan struggling a very specific struggle, but rather an individual struggling against the every extrapolating problem of life. I think it is perhaps the problem of the "Gay novel" that it tries to extrapolate itself, it is not internalized and it is not specific, it aims from the starting point to be universal to a small subsection of the population. It tries to generalize the struggle of gay men (or women, which is not the case in Maurice), and so loses its individual power. Search for identity, for love, for acceptance, etc. are all universal struggles, even for the most "normal" of individuals. While the goal of literature may be to make the particular universal, it is only implicitly done. It is impossible to make the universal particular.

The plight of Maurice is both particular and generalized, and so maybe it is a half-failure or a half-victory. Maurice's struggles are particular to him: the dynamic between he and Clive in particular is very much the friction between two individuals, the family pressure for Maurice to become the glittering replacement of his father in all ways is a problem unique to his family dynamic and the characters of his mother and sisters. But his desires and feelings of alienation seem general, his fear of social rebuff seems general, roving, imprecise. His initial self-loathing does not seem to be informed, it is confused, misguided, it is not quite a religious affectation nor a societal concern, but a sort of fear of self. This first apprehension to the idea of his love for Clive is believable, sympathetic, sincere. But this phase lacks resolution - Clive goes away and comes back changed, whether sincerely or insincerely as a matter of course. Maurice pines for him, hates him, resents him, but ultimately his feelings for him are essentially the same at the heart of the matter, a sort of kinship. But a lost fellowship. Maurice's drive is not for love but rather for companionship. This is by no means particular to the homosexual struggle, but poignant nonetheless. Where the story begins to falter is the introduction of Scudder. The reader must suspend his disbelief and take that love-in-a-glance kind of love for granted. The character of Scudder is scarcely fleshed out, and the reasons for Maurice's attraction seem to be vague at best. The issue of gay-love becomes highly generalized. We have Maurice, who although fully fleshed out in character, his motives with Scudder seem to me to be missing. Scudder on the other hand is almost a stock character, poorly characterized, maybe some form of Forster's ideal, which he imbues into Maurice's affections. Whether their attraction is mutual loneliness or true love is left unclear, there is little or no rhetoric of love, there are few bases for attraction beyond the physical. Yet we are left to believe in their mutual happiness, their rebirth and acceptance of each other: washed clean of their sins and histories, their prejudices and prides.

n  His ideal of marriage was temperate and graceful, like all his ideals, and he found a fit helpmate in Anne, who had refinement herself, and admired it in others. They loved each other tenderly. Beautiful conventions received them — while beyond the barrier Maurice wandered, the wrong words on his lips and the wrong desires in his heart, and his arms full of air.n

Perhaps this is ultimately the point which Forster wants to make? Is Maurice's 'arms full of air' any worse than the marriage of convention and convenience achieved by Anna and Clive? Is it better? While Maurice is borne away on a seemingly generalized happy ending devoid of individual passions, Clive enjoys (or suffers) the same general fate. Is Maurice happy at the book's resolution-- truly happy? Or satisfied? And what of Clive? Have Clive's passions truly inverted during his trip to the Mediterranean?

While we are meant to believe that Maurice and Scudder have found in each other a lasting love and companionship, happiness, it is rather the passions between Maurice and Clive which endure in the reader after completing the novel. It seems at one and the same time that the story of Maurice is both too long and too short. Too long to be the story of Maurice and Clive, too short to be the story of Maurice and Scudder. And so I am doubly dissatisfied. That said it is a wonderful novel: where it shines it truly is a wonder of literary craft, but where the brush is dropped there are prominent smears which disfigure the art.

Uno de los libros más hermosos que leí en el año. La nota final del autor me hizo sentir tan llena y feliz, al igual que toda la novela, incluso en sus partes oscuras. E.M Foster, te admiro muchísimo.


《Su mente se había aclarado, y tenía la sensación de que los dos estaban contra el mundo entero, de que no sólo el señor Borenius y el campo, sino el público que estaba en las gradas, y toda Inglaterra se hallaban frente a ellos. Jugaron uno para el otro y en honor de su frágil relación: si uno caía, el otro le seguiría. No pretendían causar al mundo daño alguno, pero si eran atacados, debían golpear, debían estar sobre aviso y descargar sus golpes con toda fuerza, debían mostrar que cuando dos se unen, las mayorías no triunfan.》

rep: gay mc, gay side characters

anyway, forster is my gay hero

Not my favorite style of writing but definitely worth the time. Because it was ahead of its time: a gay love (LOVE!!) story with (wait for it) a happy ending.

Very avant-garde for it’s era. Overall an easy and quick read & absolutely in love with his writing style!

«A Inglaterra nunca foi propensa a aceitar a natureza humana.»

Numa época em que a lei inglesa considerava a homossexualidade um crime, Forster era homossexual, e o facto de não o ter podido reconhecer publicamente marcou a sua obra.

«Maurice» aborda cautelosamente a homossexualidade, mas com um mínimo de pormenores, cria um ambiente de tensão sexual e erótica muito subtil.

«Ele tinha mentido. (...) mas a mentira é o alimento natural da adolescência, e ele tinha comido sofregamente.(..) Não voltaria a enganar-se tanto a si próprio. (...). Amava homens e sempre os amara. Ansiava por abraçá-los e misturar o seu ser com o deles. Agora que perdera o homem que tinha correspondido ao seu amor, ele admitiu isto.»

Uma adolescência mentindo a si próprio e o fim de uma relação com um jovem da sua classe social marcaram o seu caminho de auto-aprendizagem e aceitação.

«Era um fora-da-lei mascarado. Talvez que, entre aqueles que nos tempos antigos se tinham tornado fugitivos, tivesse havido dois homens como ele — dois. Por vezes alimentava esse sonho. Dois homens podem desafiar o mundo.»

E é desse desafio que o livro trata, e — como noutros livros do Morgan — com um homem de classe social inferior e estrangeiro.

Corajoso. Comovente. Maravilhosamente escrito.